French Couple Sentenced For Ordering Meth

Last week, three persons were arrested for ordering meth from the dark web in French Polynesia. Law enforcement authorities almost immediately released the third suspect from custody. However, a couple, aged around their 40s, was charged with, and sentenced for drug trafficking and importing narcotics from the dark web.

Customs officers detained the couple after they tried to pick up a package containing methamphetamine. According to police information, the suspects had been ordering meth from the dark web since last August. They used mostly vendors located in Canada, Germany, or in the Netherlands. In total, they ordered around 167 grams of the substance, and resold about thirty bags, weighing 0.1 grams each. They made about 1.5 million XPF (13,400 USD) in profits from the narcotics trade.

“We had the intention, first of all, to consume. A gram here is expensive. We wanted to store for our own consumption,” the woman of the couple explained. She smiled broadly at her trial as if she were still under the influence of drugs.

“The primary objective was for our consumption. We knew we were going to get [them for] ourselves. We decided to order in large quantities to store,” her partner added. The man was sentenced for probation in 2015 for violence. At the time of the crime, he was under probation.

“They were in the lure of winning easy money. This traffic is all the more incomprehensible, because the couple had an income of 700,000 francs (6,250 USD) monthly, both of them are civil servants,” the prosecutor said. According to the prosecution, “ice cannot be a product of current consumption in Polynesia”.

The suspect’s lawyer, Vincent Dubois, said that the two suspects were experiencing difficulties with their former spouses, and fallen into addiction due to that until they lost “the full sense of reality”. The couple confirmed their lawyer’s statement on their drug dependencies, they presented themselves as “large consumers of meth”.

“You can only understand this situation if you are yourself in the use of hard drugs. Who can think that one can import the drug by parcel post without getting caught?” Dubois asked the court.

The man, a civil engineering technician in the Presidency, was sentenced to four years in prison. The woman, a school professor, was imprisoned for a year. Besides the prison sentences, the couple has to pay a customs fine of 20 million XPF (178,000 USD).

Due to the lack of information, we do not know the exact location where the couple was trafficking drugs. At the time of the arrest, French speaking media outlets didn’t even know that the couple was residing in French Polynesia. Also, law enforcement authorities did not enclose how they tracked down the suspects. Since the couple was ordering large amounts of meth from abroad, and customs officers arrested them, the customs may have intercepted the package that the suspects tried to retrieve.